Abortion's underbelly

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

To get right to the nub of the legal strategy in a blockbuster abortion murder trial, the defense attorney detects a cracker in the woodpile.

Abortionist Kermit Gosnell, whose clinic was situated in a largely black West Philadelphia neighborhood, is standing trial on eights counts of murder — seven babies and one mother. He’s accused of snipping the spines of the seven infants after they were born alive. The mother, a Bhutanese refugee, was done in with an OD of Demerol, the proseuction charges.

Eight other clinic employees have pleaded guilty, and some are reportedly lined up to testify against the abortionist.

But the abortionist’s defense lawyer, Jack McMahon, one of the craftiest around, no doubt thoroughly scouted the possible angles for his client and came up with this one: Gosnell, an African American, is the real victim here.

Never mind that the Philly District Attorney is an African American. This is courtroom drama not to be deterred by a mere inconvenient fact.

Here’s a humble medical servant doing his darndest to look out for his down-and-out clientele and along come the white elitists trying to apply Mayo Clinic standards in West Philly. Can you imagine it! Mayo standards in West Philly! It’s like insisting on Harvard-level SATs for admission to Temple!

Well, we shall see how this strategy plays. It may lack the easily internalized pizzazz of “If the glove fits, you must acquit.”

But sometimes, in defense work, you just have to go with what you’ve got and make the most of it. By all accounts, there are few practitioners at the defense bar who are more adept than Jack McMahon of making the most of what you’ve got.

Now, it sounds like the prosecution is scrambling to catch up with the defense’s race-card strategy. The assistant DA reportedly says that, speaking of race, the abortionist himself conducted a sort of separate-and-not necessarily equal medical practice. Whites were kept in in their own room and received special attention blacks didn’t, the prosecution asserts.

Still, as the prosecution in the OJ case found, it’s not easy to trump a race-card defense.

And especially not at the present time in the ironically monickered City of Brotherly Love. The city’s in a current uproar over a cover story in Philadelphi Magazine chronicling the astounding discovery that there’s tension between blacks and whites and considerable wariness on the part of the latter.

Substantiating the magazine’s point that any kind of meaningful racial dialogue in the city has become virtually impossible, a highly indignant Vladimir Putin — oops, no, make that Mayor Michael Nutter — is demanding that the city’s human relations commission take the uppity publication to severe task.

Meanwhile, other than the sordid specifics of the case against the abortionist, there’ll alas likely be no opportunity for the prosecution to wander off the beaten path and explore the unsavory aspects of abortion. For example, that the abortion rate among black women is more than triple that of white women. Or that some of the “progressive”-minded have dared to make the essentially pro-eugenics case (see the best seller “Freakonomics”) that abortion keeps the crime rate down.